We are happy to announce that Dr Dmitry Chistikov has been promoted to Associate Professor from 1 April 2022. Since joining Warwick in 2017, Dmitry has made a significant contribution to the department with his research, teaching, and administrative and supportive roles. Many congratulations to Dmitry for all his achievements!

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had four papers accepted to the 54th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2022), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science. The papers are:

• "Deterministic Massively Parallel Connectivity" by Sam Coy and Artur Czumaj.
• "Improved Approximation Guarantees for Shortest Superstrings using Cycle Classification by Overlap to Length Ratios", by Matthias Englert, Nicolaos Matsakis, and Pavel Veselý.
• "Hypercontractivity on High Dimensional Expanders" by Tom Gur, Noam Lifshitz, and Siqi Liu.
• "Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions via Additive Combinatorics" by Vahid R. Asadi, Alexander Golovnev, Tom Gur, and Igor Shinkar.

We are delighted to announce that Peter Kiss, a PhD student in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has won the Best Student Paper Award at the Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) 2022 conference for his single-author paper on "Deterministic Dynamic Matching in Worst-Case Update Time". Computing a maximum matching in a graph is one of the most fundamental problems in design and analysis of algorithms. The paper makes important progress on this problem in a setting where the input graph is changing over time via a sequence updates, and one wishes to maintain a large matching efficiently in such a dynamic graph. Along the way, the paper develops a general purpose technique for converting any dynamic algorithm with amortised update time into one with worst-case update time, provided the initial algorithm is able to handle a more general form of batch updates.

We are very pleased to welcome Alex Dixon, a new Teaching Fellow in our department.

Alex first joined the department in 2013, originally as an undergraduate student, and then as a postgraduate student studying automata theory. He has a keen interest in logic, automata, and functional programming.

We look forward to having him in the team!

We are delighted to report that Dr Ramanujan Sridharan (PI) from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) research theme at the Department of Computer Science and Professor Graham Cormode (Co-I, affiliated with FoCS) have been awarded an EPSRC Standard Research Grant, "New Horizons in Multivariate Preprocessing (MULTIPROCESS)".

This 4-year £540K project aims to advance the theory of preprocessing by designing novel multivariate preprocessing algorithms and extending their scope to high-impact big data paradigms such as streaming algorithms.

The Mathematical Association of America has presented Mike Paterson with a 2021 Paul Halmos - Lester Ford Award for an article of "expository excellence published in The American Mathematical Monthly". There were several unusual aspects to this paper: the title, "A head-ache causing problem"; the authors, "Conway, J.H., Paterson, M.S., and Moscow, U.S.S.R"; the sole reference in the paper is to itself; the main result is first disproved and then proved; and the acknowledgments make clear that Conway wrote the paper. Paterson previously received this award in 2010 (then the Lester Ford Award) for his "Overhang" article. More information can be found here.

In further good news, Dr Tanaya Guha and Dr Ramanujan Sridharan have been promoted to Associate Professor, effective from 1 July 2021 and 2 October 2021 (respectively). Many congratulations to them, whose recommendations in particular state:

[Dr Guha has] grown her research group to five PhD students currently, and attracted a portfolio of research grants in her career, including recently a substantial award from Ford. ... In engagement, Dr Guha has been raising the visibility of Warwick in her national and international research communities through her invited talks, leadership in the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, programme committee memberships, and conference organisation activities. She has also contributed substantially to the Sutton Trust summer school, a key outreach programme.

and

Dr Sridharan’s high standing in the research community is confirmed by his invited talks at international meetings and leading universities, memberships of the programme committees of prestigious conferences, and his organisation of international research events. ... In teaching, Dr Sridharan has successfully led (jointly and individually) two undergraduate modules. The feedback from students has been generally positive, with many appreciative of Dr Sridharan’s innovative and energetic delivery.